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Controlling Communications That Teach or Demonstrate Violence: “The Movie Made Them Do It”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2021
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Violence sells, Americans have what sometimes seems to be an insatiable appetite for it. Depictions and descriptions of violence saturate our culture. songs urge us to rape women, kill police officers, and commit suicide. Movies portray-indeed they glorifyviolence as an intrinsic element of every imaginable plot line.
Despite substantial evidence that an individual’s repeated exposure to portrayals of violence is associated with significantly increased likelihood that the individual will commit aggressive acts against others, no legal regime currently regulates such portrayals either on television, in music, in movies, or in video games. Neither Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, nor any state legislature has yet mustered the political will to impose substantial or systematic legal constraints upon producers or purveyors of violent images. Official censorship is rightly to be feared, but unreflective invocations of our commitment to freedom of speech provide incomplete justification for our legal regime’s apparent indifference to the possibility that media-induced violence may impose substantial costs on innocent victims.
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